Loren's Blog at LumberJocks.comhttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog
Mon, 21 May 2018 23:27:37 GMTmethods of work #43: Making liquid hide gluehttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/122977
I’ve been running tests for veneering with liquid hide glue I make myself from granules. I’ve also used hot hide glue for veneering and I like it a lot but its short working time imposes some limits. Liquid hide glue can be made by adding other stuff to hide glue and cooking it. I used salt.

One recipe I tried involved 2 parts glue, 3 parts water and 1 part salt. This recipe didn’t work out very well for veneering, though the glue produced has some useful characteristics. It is fluid, even runny at room temperature and it has a high initial tack so the veneer doesn’t shift around. Unfortunately it also soaks into the veneer excessively and causes excessive veneer expansion which results in adhesion problems away from the edges. It didn’t cure well in the press though perhaps I pressed it too long resulting in dry edges and a wet center. I think it would be a good glue for rubbed joints. The recipe I followed suggested adding salt after letting the mixture gel overnight and this also caused problems because the salt crystals didn’t dissolve thoroughly after being cooked for two hours twice over and cooled in the refrigerator in between. I strained the salt crystals after the second cooling.

The second liquid hide glue recipe I tried worked better for veneering. It uses a lot less salt and I dissolved the salt in hot water first. I added the hide glue to the water which is a mistake. It’s better to add the water to the hide glue because any moisture in the jar will cause glue crystals to stick to the sides where they won’t dissolve and will either have to be wiped out or pushed down into the water with a rubber scraper. Pouring the crystals into the center of the jar using a funnel may also prevent any from sticking to the sides.

The second recipe produces a thicker glue that is not usable at room temperature. It can be made liquid by placing the jar in a hot tap water bath for a couple of minutes. The recipe is 1/2 cup hide glue granules, 2 tsp salt, and 1/2 cup water. After the mixture sits overnight the glue was cooked (like hot hide glue) for 2 hours and then cooled in the refrigerator and cooked again afterwards to dissolve any remaining crystals.

The second glue worked well for adhering veneer to MDF in a screw press. I tried overnight pressing and a 3 hour press time and both test pieces showed good adhesion.

The salt acts as a preservative and it stands to reason that adding more salt makes the shelf life longer in addition to decreasing its working temperature.

I used to run distance but injuries led me to stop. I looked at buying a rowing machine and found out they come at a lot of price points and most of them under $1000 are problematic in one way or another. Some use gas springs that may be weak and wear out. Some use magnetic resistance but again, some users complain they don’t get a good workout from them. Some of the nicer ones use a fan for air resistance, based on the Concept2 design I think. The patents may have run out but the original maker still has a good reputation and many of the knockoff brands don’t.

So I looked to see what was involved in building one and discovered it could be done on the cheap using scrounged bicycle parts, wood and a little hardware. I think I only spent about $7 for a bicycle chain and everything else I had on hand or collected during the time I was thinking about building the machine. The vanes are cut from 4” drain pipe. They’re each attached with one screw and some go wonky in use but there’s enough clearance so it doesn’t cause operational problems. The rollers underneath for the return system are made from lengths of plastic tube from the straw out of a reusable water bottle with a flip-up valve.

I didn’t know if it would be worth a darn, but it is. It puts up pretty good resistance and the harder you pull the more resistance you get.

I got the plans from an open source document created by a rowing coach who had worked in Africa and helped rowers there develop the machines.

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Tue, 15 May 2018 19:43:03 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/122657LorenLorenMachine mods, oddities, and fix-ups #18: Motor winding connective wires, smokedhttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/46329
Here’s part of a European c-face motor with damaged connectivewires coming off the winding. It’s rather a proprietary sort ofarrangement powering a slow-speed gearbox, so I have to figureout how to repair the wires or have the core rewound. Ugh.

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Tue, 15 Jul 2014 00:16:10 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41785LorenLorenmethods of work #40: More Chinese chair mockupshttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41698
The end grain of the crest rail had to be carefully marked and carved/planed to fit the squared boards the armpieces are cut from. This is one of those things thatmakes chairs kind of funny where there are curvedparts intersecting. All it takes is patience and sharptools. I used a low angle jack plane some, sliding the plane sideways as I pushed to sheer off endgrain shavings, not something I had done before. before that I got close using chisels and rasps to getit close.

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Sat, 05 Jul 2014 03:25:32 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41670LorenLorenmethods of work #38: Another test of steambendinghttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41635
Testing limits. This 1” thick by 4” wide board was really difficult for me to pull around. Due to figure this board is probably a less than ideal candidate for steam bending but now I know I can bend this part, so it’s good enough for a prototype I think.

I’m going to make a horizontal back crest for a stool design I had an idea for. The part actually cracked a bit at one end, due to the wild figure perhaps or maybe just because I split the end block at the same spot pulling it around. I don’t need the part that split anyway because I’m going to cut this part off so it’s not really like an armrest, it will just kind of hint at that… we’ll see. I already had the form for another bend in narrower material and didn’t want to make another form just to try out this idea.

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Tue, 01 Jul 2014 02:40:40 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41635LorenLorenmethods of work #37: Modernist chair - riffing on a vocabulary of shapeshttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41601
This is turning out as an interesting design. I am personally not that modernist leaning in my tastes, but I like to play with combining shapes and doing technical things for the heck of it. It occurred to me I could use the bent u-shape I used on other chairs to do this one, since it does actually work for parking one’s posterior and I know how to make it already. I was gonna do something trapezoidal, but really this is easier to make for me and introduces a whole new level to the geometric presentation of the chair from every angle. Chairs are sculpture in the round, which is part of why, aesthetically speaking, making a good one is considered so challenging. In reality they aren’t that hard to do, but one does have to know enough to do joinery well.

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Sat, 28 Jun 2014 01:22:50 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41601LorenLorenmethods of work #36: Ebonizing an oak/ash chairhttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41545
Ebonizing the chair. There were some surface checks in the back and flaws in the materials I used for the legs. I filled the grain and checks with water putty mixed with black dye. After sanding that dried filler back, I dye it several times with the same black. The grain fill job isn’t perfect, so it won’t look like a piano (they wouldn’t ebonize an open grained wood for a piano anyway), but if I keep laying on the black dye eventually I’ll win and get something close to the real color of ebony. After that a film finish brings up the gloss. I’ve been “french polishing” using oil-modified water soluble polyurethane instead of shellac with good results.

I use t-shirt material held in a hemostat. I have a bunch of those I’ve acquired over the years. The dye does get on my fingers but being dissolved in water it washes off skin far more easily than alcohol dyes.

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Mon, 23 Jun 2014 22:10:06 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41545LorenLorenmethods of work #35: Wedging through tenonshttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41521
Wedges are cut on a band saw jig which is simply a piece of plywood with a notch cut out which runs against the rip fence.

The slots I cut on the band saw too, making each slot the widthof two band saw blade kerfs, so about 3/32”.

I use glue too, just as normal with a mortise and tenon joint, brushing it on the cheeks and sides of the tenons. I didn’tuse glue on the wedges. Once cut off flush the chancethat they would somehow wiggle loose is remote, imo.

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Sat, 21 Jun 2014 22:57:16 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41521LorenLorenmethods of work #34: 2 curvy dining chair prototypeshttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41509
Here’s the recent chair prototype on the right shown in relation an older prototype where I used laminations rather than steam bending to form the curves.

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Fri, 20 Jun 2014 03:12:36 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41509LorenLorenmethods of work #33: Through tenons for a dining chairhttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41478
Chair dry assembled. Through tenons (instead of blind tenons) are kind of a hassle but they are the right choice for this chair for structural reasons. On the legs they are not needed but I figured why not go all and do them anyway. The seat is from another chair prototype and I think not the right shape for this chair. I’ll make another one tapered in at the back and see how that works.

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Mon, 16 Jun 2014 19:41:16 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41478LorenLorenmethods of work #32: "Composing" a bent wood dining chairhttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41442
“Composing” a bent wood dining chair. The back board is filthy from tannins in the wood reacting to the steam used to bend it. It can be scraped off. The front legs are bent slightly off the corner so there’s a little flair both outwards and forward at the bottom. The chair is too tall and deep for a normal person right now because the front legs need to be cut down a bit (I leave parts overlong for bending because sometimes a crack or other distortion forms the ends have to be cut off to remove it) and the 2×6 establishing the distance between the front and back is just a random scrap piece.

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Fri, 13 Jun 2014 16:59:08 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41442LorenLorenmethods of work #31: Steam bending a leg off the corner.https://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41437
Adaptation of the Veritas strap to bending a leg on the corner. The form has a v-groove and the wood end stop is chiseled out to make a 1/4” deep cradle to position the leg.

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Sun, 08 Jun 2014 22:12:23 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41398LorenLorenmethods of work #30: Steam bending a wide boardhttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41383
My heaviest steam bend yet… an oak board about 7” wide and 1.25” thickand tapered to 7/8” at the other. It took several days of setup before I hit on attaching the form to a 1000lb boat anchor of a vintage case clamp. I tried doing it on the work bench with the form on its back but thatwas hopeless due to the awkwardness and weight of the bendingapparatus that has to be loaded with a steamed part and quickly clampedto the form.

I’ll need to improve this and maybe use a come-along or block-and-tackle to pull it around next time but this at least shows I can get the shapeI want. A 6 foot pipe used as a lever only worked for about 1/3d of the bend before I picked up the clamps and desperately screwed them tight, alternating, to close the bend before the wood cooled too much.

I used a polycarbonate backing strip in between the steel bending straps and the wood to prevent possible grain lift-out and I think a happy consequence was it helped insulate the wood a bit, enough perhaps to lengthen the working time in order to close the bend with the clamps.

There was a good deal of springback but the shape is still adequatelycurved for what I want to do with it. The sharper the bend theless the wood springs back because a sharp bend permanentlycrushes more cells on the inside of the bend.

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Fri, 23 May 2014 18:20:22 GMThttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41206LorenLorenMachine mods, oddities, and fix-ups #14: Making a replacement extension table for Tannewitz table sawhttps://www.lumberjocks.com/Loren/blog/41141
Tannewitz made these saws with a robust rack and pinion fencewith about a 9” range. In order to cut wider than 9” you haveto re-locate the fence using a series of tapered holes in theextension table. Without the extension there is only one set ofholes to the left of the blade, severely limiting the fence’s usefulnessin working sheet goods.

My recently acquired 1930s-era Tannewitz JS variety saw cameto me lacking the extension table and a few other parts. I contemplatedgiving up and selling the fence to install some sort of modernaftermarket fence, but many fences would have to be modifiedanyway to be compatible with the sliding deck to the left ofthe blade.

It occurred to me to weld up some doohickey to drill taperedpin holes into in order to have some additional fence position,but then it occurred to me that I could salvage the cast irontable off a trashed Craftsman table saw I had hauled homea few weeks ago, thinking I could salvage the arbor in orderto cobble up an improved belt-driven head for my panel saw.

I cut the table off with a cut off wheel on an angle grinder. The iron wasn’t too difficult to cut with the wheel.

After I cut it off I spent about 20 minutes trying to makethe remaining rough edges look a little better. For some reason a previous owner of the Craftsman table saw hadmade some dramatic modifications, drilling holes and breakingout part of the hole in the top, perhaps even puttingtwo saws together like Frankenstein…. it’s quite a bizarre collection of parts.

Here’s the table propped up in position so I can look at itand consider how to go about drilling matching holes so I can bolt it to the Tannewitz with a reasonably flushjoint across the top.